If you're a fan of Samsung's Galaxy smartphones, you will be glad to hear the latest rumor making the rounds. Sources are indicating that Samsung is set to announce its next high-end smartphone called the Galaxy S IV on March 14. The mid-March introduction date was unveiled started with a tweet from Eldar Murtazin.

Murtazin wrote, "Save the date for a big announcement - March 14 :) And keep silence ;) HTC will miss HTC One sales again :( Like it was in 2012."

The Verge backs up that tweet, stating that March 14 is "definitely" the day that Samsung will be unveiling its latest generation flagship smartphone.

Another interesting tidbit that comes from the sources claiming to be familiar with Samsung's plans is that the manufacturer will focus on features rather than raw specifications.

The sources said, "The leap in cool new features from [Galaxy S III] to the next flagship will be bigger." That would seemingly mean that the leap and features would be bigger between the S III and S IV that it was between the S II and the S III.

Actually that's not accurate. I own both devices and the iPhone 5's screen is the most colour accurate on the market to the point where if you put the same picture on it next to the G3 the superiority of the Apple device is obvious, even in 'Natural' mode on the G3. Amoled displaying Blue and Green naturally just has a very weird tint to it, though this is worse at any angle to the screen. I also found the pixel structure on the S3 awful, and wonder why more people don't notice especially on such a big screen.

The number of reviews that don't mention either the colour tint, the visible sub-pixel structure from a standard operating distance, lack of brightness in manual or auto mode (especially in sunlight, where it is intolerable) or the lousy trailing (time to to go from white to black per pixel) on the G3 is crazy. If you look at the Note 2 the display is night and day better, although I still tip my hat to the IP5 for more accurate colour and a decent 'retina' quality screen.

If Samsung can improve the screen for the S4 and put something a bit more revolutionary into it, it will be interesting to see what happens to Samsung's sales. They make the screens themselves, so there is really no excuse! The S3 in my mind stagnated a bit in technical terms from the success of the S2, all the more in the US market which received a neutered version anyway...100% agree that the Nexus 4 is a much nicer device overall, and much more how you imagine Google would like to present Android to the world.

I said "CNET tested the latter", i.e. the Note 2, in natural/movie mode, not the S3. It's more indicative of the S4 display, not the S3, so throw out 90% of what you wrote because it's irrelevant for this topic.

All LCDs, including the iPhone5, have bluish tints on blacks, and their many-times-too-bright output for blacks (which gets worse off angle or after pressing the screen) is percentage-wise far more inaccurate than imperceptibly inaccurate colors. You don't see that in deltaE results because they measure absolute error, not relative, and almost always measure primaries alone.

Tipping your hat to the IP5 for ppi (I assume that's what you're refering to by 'retina') is nonsense when the resolution is lower. Put the Note 2's screen further away from your face so that its image is closer in size to the iPhone and you get more angular resolution, not less.

I suspect Apple does some color calibration based on samples of the screen hardware they use in their phones, but it's not per device. This is a redux of the Mac vs PC in the 1990s. Apple made an attempt to color calibrate their computers and displays. PC makers did not. That's why Macs captured such a large share of the professional graphics and artists community.

In the 2000s, color profiling and color calibration started to become affordable making this a moot issue. Colorimeters are now in the $100-$200 range. Even if your equipment comes pre-profiled, there's often significant improvement from doing your own custom color profile. So even Mac owners doing professional graphics work own a colorimeter.

Which brings us to phones. Color accuracy should not be an issue on phones. It's a problem which was solved over a decade ago on PCs. Android and iOS simply need to add support for color profiles, and the phone stores need to have a $150 colorimeter. If you're unhappy with the color accuracy of your phone, the store could then generate a new profile, load it, and your phone's colors are now accurate. If the color of the screen shifts with age (as I suspect AMOLED does), then you just take it back to the store for a new profile every 6-12 months.

The only reason it's not being done is that the vast majority of phone buyers simply don't care. The only people who care are a handful of graphics professionals, and legions of fanboys looking for anything to argue about.

The iPad 3/4 in particular is nearly reference quality out of the factory, something that is remarkable for a $500 consumer product. We've started using them at work for quick color passes on images when we're in the field. Very convenient and completely unexpected.

Getting this level of color calibration from other manufacturers would be great but HTC seems to be the only other company interested in making their screens look good.

"We are going to continue to work with them to make sure they understand the reality of the Internet. A lot of these people don't have Ph.Ds, and they don't have a degree in computer science." -- RIM co-CEO Michael Lazaridis